It’s a cool question, but I’m not sure how to answer. I think all of those are really hard to empathize with. I think it’s really hard to empathize with people I know well! Like, I can do it, but in many cases it takes a bunch of effort and talking with them. Understanding someone so well that you could somewhat predict what sorts of things would actually shift them deeply (make them change political parties, change jobs, start or end relationships, etc.) is very difficult; usually people don’t even understand themselves that way.
“It’s hard to empathize with them because it’s hard to empathize with most people who don’t agree with me” has rather different implications than “it’s hard to empathize with this group in particular”.
I don’t think that understanding people better than they understand themselves is empathy. That’s cognitive modeling.
Empathy is being able to step into a worldview such that you can see what they see and feel what they feel, this requires some cognitive modeling but mostly seems to use different machinery.
My pretty strong guess is that to do good cognitive modeling, you have to do something like empathy, and also vice versa; or rather, to do either very well, you have to be gemini modeling much of the fundamentals of their worldview/mindset/umwelt/etc. But I’m not super confident, there are many experts in empathy who would know better what it involves.
It’s a cool question, but I’m not sure how to answer. I think all of those are really hard to empathize with. I think it’s really hard to empathize with people I know well! Like, I can do it, but in many cases it takes a bunch of effort and talking with them. Understanding someone so well that you could somewhat predict what sorts of things would actually shift them deeply (make them change political parties, change jobs, start or end relationships, etc.) is very difficult; usually people don’t even understand themselves that way.
“It’s hard to empathize with them because it’s hard to empathize with most people who don’t agree with me” has rather different implications than “it’s hard to empathize with this group in particular”.
I don’t think that understanding people better than they understand themselves is empathy. That’s cognitive modeling.
Empathy is being able to step into a worldview such that you can see what they see and feel what they feel, this requires some cognitive modeling but mostly seems to use different machinery.
My pretty strong guess is that to do good cognitive modeling, you have to do something like empathy, and also vice versa; or rather, to do either very well, you have to be gemini modeling much of the fundamentals of their worldview/mindset/umwelt/etc. But I’m not super confident, there are many experts in empathy who would know better what it involves.